We shall see... I have a straight gate shifter on the Doug Nash. Now understand, this is all just on paper and in daydreams right now but with such a low first gear combination I think the first shift will come really quick and with the longer ladder bars extending the weight transfer, if it is wheels up off the line, I think the first shift will have to happen as they are coming down. There was a red 55 Chevy in the Dallas area that I saw several times in the late 1990s early 2000 at the Texas Motorplex. It pulled the front wheels and carried them nearly 600 feet. He shifted twice with the wheels up. It was awesome to watch!
Understood and good point. I thought about going 3/4" (I may have to later). But the narrowed nine inch housing that I am using came out of a wheel standing 9.90 1960 Chevy. It was already set up for the 5/8th heims. I decided not to re-engineer it. I am not going to be very heavy but as they say, "you maybe right!" Also this is more of a g***er hot rod then a full on drag car. It will make some p***es on the Street and Strip but nothing like a total weekend warrior car.
Just a note here. The extreme angles on the two rear heims will not allow any adjustment. As you turn them in or out the distance between mounting points will change, so they wont match your axle bracket bolt pattern. I would change the rear so the mounting points are parallel, and it makes adjustments much easier. My Comp ladder bars have a little angle, and it's a PITA to shorten one and lengthen the other (when adjusting pinion angle) and end up with them still fitting back into the brackets when I'm done.
I would get rid of the front heims joints and install solid ones with bushings and step up the size. Look at Chris Alston stuff and you will get the idea.
That is a really good point and one that we thought about long and hard. Being a smaller car and utilizing the stock frame and cross member we have some crazy clearance issues. In order to maximize the available room for rear end up and down travel we really needed to drop off that top mount at a pretty steep angle. Making even a 2" upper mounting point (parallel with the bottom) reduced our clearance space by nearly 70%. So we basically made the call to preset our Pinion angle and then build the custom Ladder Bars to fit the space we had. We can still adjust it a few degrees but your are correct, this set up leaves no room for any major adjustments.
That is good call and something we really considered doing but since we are extremely limited in our rear mount point adjustments, the front is the only way to control the exact placement (in the fender wells and square with the world etc.) of the rear end. The Heims that are in the photo are just for mock up purposes, I have Chrome Moly ones for the final install. We shall see.
I think most builders will tell you 3 degrees down to start (chime in someone if I am wrong). How much travel depends on what kind of suspension.
You might look at the way Ladder/Link bars are set up. I think Compe***ion Engineering makes them. That's 3 degrees down from the rear face of the transmission tailhousing, not 3 degrees down from level.
Sorry if i missed it somewhere what are you running in the rear leafs, coilovers, or ??? you might contact agasaustin on this board ask his .02 cents his austin leaves hard with wheels up seen run at ohio couple years ago
I wanted to run the original leaf springs on a floater system to keep more with the old school look. But I just don't have any room in there. I am still playing with the idea of a transverse leaf but I will probably just take the easy way out and put coil overs on it.
Well we had a little accident while ***embling the original Ladder Bars. I started screwing in the new Chrome Moly Heim Ends up front while that area was still cooling from the final welds. I got the first one screwed about halfway in and it seized up. I don't know why but I started trying the second one and got the same result, about halfway in. I didn't use anti-seize on them because I was just messing around. The Heim Ends weren't though (messing around). They galled up so bad that I could not break them loose. I put a steel bar in one of them and could not budge it. I put a piece of pipe on the steel bar to help torque them out. They were so stuck that I ended up pulling the ball right out of it. Later with a big pipe wrench and the same piece of pipe on it, I twisted the head right off that heavy duty Heim End. So....nothing left to do but cut the entire ends off of the just finished ladder bars. With that being said we decided to take the same bars and change the rear mounting points so we could make normal adjustments. We also decided to change the front mount points to steel bushing.
We always used the rule of thumb that the front of the ladder bars, or the intersection point (imaginary lines extended past the bars) of a 4 bar should intersect the line drawn from the contact patch on the tire up through the center of gravity. That means that shorter bars could point more down. Long ladder bars could get the same effect , but had to intersect at a higher point. As cars became lower, packaging made it easier to use shorter bars. Also, less adjustment was required to make a larger difference.
The Jalopy Journal
